00:00:00 Sheri: People with lower futuristic really struggle with that like what do you want to do in the future? What do you dream about for your life? They really, really have a hard time with that. I had comments from people outside of my group because I posed the question to other Strengths coaches, and they're like, "Yeah, I hate that question. What do you want to do in the future?" Let's set your five year, 10 year, 20 year vision goals. They struggle with that, and I never knew that. I never knew that because I'm high futuristic, and so many of us do when we have a talent theme. It doesn't matter which of the 34 it is. When it's high for us and it comes so easy for us, so natural for us, we don't realize that it's a struggle for someone else.
00:00:59 Sheri: Welcome to the Discovering Your Calling Podcast. I'm your host, Sheri Miter. I'm here to help you unleash your strengths and get clarity on your calling. I believe when you find your purpose in life, fulfillment, joy and success will follow. If you're ready, pop in those earbuds, hit that follow button and join me on this journey toward discovering your calling.
00:01:28 Sheri: Aristotle famously wrote, “The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.” And lately, that is how I've been feeling about CliftonStrengths aka strengthsfinder. It seems the more I dive into it with my clients and podcast guests, the more I'm just amazed at how impactful they can be. And the more I get to learn how unique each individual is based on their natural talent themes. And I want to share today just a few ways that recently, Strengths has been showing up, like I said in the Discovering Your Calling group program that I have with my clients there and also in the podcast guests. And I want to share these because I want to inspire you.
00:02:18 Sheri: One. If you have already taken the CliftonStrengths yourself, maybe you took it for work years ago. I cannot tell you how many times I hear this like, "Oh, I think I took that 10 years ago for a work workshop. I'll have to see if I can find my top five," or, "I think I took that 20 years ago in high school or college , and I need to see if I can find them," or, "Oh, I think I may have took that one time. I have no idea what they were," and I hear that over and over and over again. And you know what? I was guilty of that, too, because so many times we take this assessment along with all the other assessments, the Myers-Briggs, the DISC, there's new ones that come out all the time. So we take these assessments. Enneagram today is hot. And we don't know what to do with that information, no matter what assessment it is.
00:03:14 Sheri: And that's the downside of it because whether it's CliftonStrengths or these other assessments, once you take it, spend time diving into it. Don't just take the assessment and say, "Oh, that's interesting," and tuck it away, because otherwise it's just a waste of time. And what I encourage you to do is if you did take the CliftonStrengths before, you can always go over to Gallup and email them and find your previous assessment. You don't have to take it all over again as long as you know the email address that you had when you took the assessment. If you have not taken the assessment, then I highly encourage you to take the time. It is a more pricey assessment.
00:04:00 Sheri: But the reason it is, is it's such a wealth of information that you do not get from any other assessment I have ever seen out there. And I am an assessment junkie. Ask my husband. I love them all. I am totally all about self awareness, and the more you know about yourself, the better you can show up for the world. But I digress. So if you need information, I'll share a link below in the show notes on how to take the assessment if you've never done that. But if you have, if you have taken it, pull out your assessment and re-read it, especially the CliftonStrengths 34 report that is customized just for you.
00:04:44 Sheri: And as I always share with my students in the Discovering Your Calling program, the way I look at that CliftonStrengths report is that is your guiding light. And that's one of the reasons why, or the main reason why I should say that I use the Compass Rose as my symbol because I feel like your CliftonStrengths, your top five, even your top ten talent themes, they are your guiding light to success in life. And if you ever feel like you are getting lost, you're off course, you don't know what direction to go in, just go back to your report. Re-read your report, remind yourself how amazing you are. Remind yourself how you show up as your absolute best self and how you can have more success in the world. Add more value to where you work, and just be the best version of you, the version that God designed you to be. That's the way I look at CliftonStrengths. Those are your God given talents. It's your talent DNA, and it's what God put inside of you when he designed you, nobody else. Well, you're one in 33 million, so there might be somebody else on the face of the earth that has your unique top five top, top 10 talent themes in the exact same order. But you know what? They don't have your background. They don't have your story. So we're all unique. So we need to learn how to show up and be our most unique selves.
00:06:17 Sheri: Okay, I got on a soapbox there. I didn't mean to do that, but hopefully hear my passion for the talent themes. But again, I want to go back and I want to share just a couple of things have been happening, and two were podcast episodes. Now one came out last week, so it would depend on when you're listening to this. It's season four, episode 12 with Tom Tompkins. And we got into talking about his talent themes, which his top five are ideation, input, activator, intellection and strategic. So if you know anything about the CliftonStrengths themes, you can imagine that this was a highly intelligent, intellectual conversation.
00:07:00 Sheri: And it was really interesting for me to have this with Tom because I just loved the way his brain worked. And he wasn't afraid to challenge status quo. He's not afraid to think a new thought, he's not afraid to push the... most people believe this, but I want to question, is this really the way it should be? So if you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to that episode 12 with Tom because you will pick up just some fresh perspective on life as he shares his journey and how... when he dove into the CliftonStrengths. He's also an assessment junkie like I am, he dove into them, how they really helped kind of guide him to where he is today. And it helped him change the mindset of you have to fix your weaknesses.
00:07:53 Sheri: You'll also hear him talk about how before he found out about CliftonStrengths, he was always in that mindset of, "I just have to practice harder." The 10,000 hours rule. If you practice anything for 10,000 hours, you're going to get better proficient at it. That's not always true because you can practice something that's not in your wheelhouse for 10,000 hours. You maybe get good at it, but you won't become excellent at it if it's not within one of your natural talents. Now, if you take one of your natural talent themes, and you work at them and you use them in real life for 10,000 hours, oh, my goodness, you would be unstoppable like there would be nothing that you can't do, and you would become a master in your realm of calling, your calling, really. You could become that master person if you dive into how you naturally think, feel and behave based on your talent themes. So Tom's story is just very interesting. And it was just really at that high level intellectual conversation to hear how he's used his strengths.
00:09:07 Sheri: And then I had another conversation for somebody else who's just as brilliant. This episode is going to be coming out next week, so again, depending on when you're listening to this. Season four, episode 14, it was a conversation with Emily Sadri, who also was familiar with her CliftonStrengths. And her top five are woo, communication, activator, restorative, and futuristic. And we really spent a lot of time talking about how and why she felt that her career as a labor and delivery nurse just felt off for her. There was something missing and she was getting burned out in that career. She felt like she wasn't respected as much as she would like to be. And even though she was good at it, it wasn't the right place for her.
00:10:03 Sheri: And without even really knowing it, Emily really tapped into her top five talent themes to create her own very unique business. And you have to listen to the episode to hear what I'm talking about. It blew my mind when Emily shared how she started her business, what her business plan was in the beginning, and what she was doing for women. Today, she is a hormone expert, a nurse practitioner specializing in hormone experts. But the way she designed her company was just so unique. But it came out of the dissatisfaction she had because her activator wasn't being respected. Her restorative needed to have problems solved, and she used it to create this unique way of practicing medicine with her patients. Because, let's face it, this is not probably something new for you to hear, but the medical world right now is broken. It is so broken whether my husband's an EMT, so whether you're from an EMT perspective, driving the ambulances all the way to the nurses in the hospital and the doctors, the medical system is so broken right now.
00:11:18 Sheri: And Emily saw this a few years ago. And because of her high restorative, which sees problems and likes to fix problems, her futuristic where she could see the possibility that lies ahead, and her activator wasn't afraid to go out and start something new, those talents specifically helped her launch into what she does today. And again, I don't want to give it away here. You really need to listen to the episode to hear this unique design of what she created for her business, especially if you are a woman, you are going to love what she's doing out there.
00:11:54 Sheri: So those were just two really fun conversations I was able to have recently with the podcast guest on how they're knowing their talent themes showed up in their life. And even for Emily, like I said, she knew about them. But until we had the conversation, did she really realize the influence her talent themes had on the decisions she made to create her calling?
00:12:20 Sheri: The last two things I just wanted to share here were conversations I've been having an awareness for me in my Discovering Your Calling group program that's going on right now. One was around futuristic. Now I am high futuristic. And I was shocked that people with futuristic in their lower probably bottom 10 themes, so from 24 to 34, how they have such a hard time really dreaming about the future. And I never realized this. And this was like mind blow for me because I spent 25 plus years trying to help women dream about the future possibilities they could have in a direct sales market. And I didn't realize why so many of the women I was coaching had a hard time doing it.
00:13:19 Sheri: So in our group program, it became very evident that futuristic, if it's low, like I said, even 24 to 34, people with lower futuristic really struggle with that. Like what do you want to do in the future? What do you dream about for your life? They really, really have a hard time with that. I had comments from people outside of my group because I posed a question to other ranks coaches, and they're like, "Yeah, I hate that question. What do you want to do in the future?" Let's set your five year, 10 year, 20 year vision goals. They struggle with that. And I never knew that. I never knew that because I'm high futuristic, and like so many of us do when we have a talent theme. It doesn't matter which of the 34 it is when it's high for us and it comes so easy for us, so natural for us, we don't realize that it's a struggle for someone else.
00:14:23 Sheri: And this, like I said, was such a mind blowing thing for me because I never realized what a struggle it was for people without high futuristic, because, again, it's my number one, and I love to 'visioneer.' I love to goal set. I love to think about the future and paint a picture of what it could be. Now, knowing that futuristic and planning and goal setting was hard for the women in my group, I was able to pivot a little bit and create a new thought and help them set goals, talk about the future, but in a way that I had to reframe how we did it. I had to change the language I used even. And based on their top five top ten talent themes, I was able to help guide them a little bit. I was also able to really lean on my futuristic to help them dream so that they could step into the picture based on how I could help them see it and give that hope. So that was really just like I said, it was a mind blow for me because they're like, "Oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? I have been doing this helping people set goals or trying to help them set goals my entire life," and I never realized what a struggle it was for some people. So, like I said, that was just such a great learning experience for me.
00:15:54 Sheri: And then the last one, I'm just going to and I'm not going to dive deep into this. I feel like this should be a whole nother podcast another time. But it was just another lesson for me because, again, as I started off this podcast with the more you know, the more you realize you don't know was a really insightful conversation we had around the responsibility theme. And this theme shows up a lot. A lot. I feel like probably 80% of my clients have responsibility in their top 10. And this theme, I mean, we need people with high responsibility in the world because it would be pure chaos if people didn't have high responsibility like nobody would show up for work, right? Which I know. I know. I hear you, somebody out there is saying, "Well, they don't know." No, it's not that bad. Seriously, nothing would ever get done if people didn't have high responsibility.
00:16:49 Sheri: But there's also the caveat of that is sometimes people with high responsibility, or often people with high responsibility, I should say, feel... no pun intended, responsible to be the one that completes the task at work. They're the one that at the office, everybody can count on them to do their share and then some. They're the one in the family that's the go to person to make sure mom and dad are well taken care of into their 90s. They're the one at school, maybe, that everybody goes to like, "Hey, help me with this homework." People with high responsibility, they are that person that go-to person that everybody leans on to make sure things get accomplished.
00:17:40 Sheri: And as you can imagine, if you are high responsibility and you are that person, it is draining, it's exhausting. And it's one of those traits that really, if you have high responsibility, I strongly urge you to book a coaching call and really talk to somebody through that because there are ways that you can make your responsibility work better for you. And a couple of my clients, we had a long conversation around responsibility one night, and it was just so freeing for them to hear tips and tools on how they can lean into other talent themes so they don't have the burden of everybody looking to them for the answers.
00:18:22 Sheri: So it wasn't a surprising conversation like futuristic, what I learned about futuristic. But it was just such an insightful conversation, and I really felt the burden these women who have high responsibility feel for their families, for their jobs, for the other people on their teams. And it really just took a lot of time to work through that. So they can let go of that need to be the one responsible for all the things, to ask for help, to learn to delegate, to let other people step up and use their talent themes, even if it doesn't look the way you would do it. So that was just another really just insightful conversation that we were able to have in the group.
00:19:08 Sheri: So I just want to close up here and again, just strongly urge you it's just been so evident to me over the last month how powerful, how very powerful the CliftonStrengths really, really are for us to know who we are at our core, know which talent themes help us at what given time, what talent themes might get in the way of our success. And I call it dialing up and dialing down. Which ones do we need to dial up? And which ones do we need to dial down based on any given situation. And how they can also just be, again, that guiding light to lead us to our calling, to lead us to that place that God designed you to be.
00:20:01 Sheri: So I hope this inspires you to go look up your report if you took it. Whether you took it five years ago, five months ago, or ten years ago, go find that report. Re-read it. In fact, actually, one of the things I've challenged my students to do is each night, read one of their talent themes, the whole description of how it describes them personally based on their other themes. To read that every night, make it the last thing before you go to bed, because that is like a positive affirmation for how amazing you are. And if you really want double bonus points, read it in the morning, too.
00:20:34 Sheri: So you can read all five if you want, if you have the time. Or just read one every night, and you will just naturally start stepping into your amazing who you are, just like Tom did and Emily did, and they will guide you to become that person and find your true calling. If you have any questions, you know where to find me. You can email me. sherimiterco@gmail.com. One R in Sheri, one R in Miter. S-H-E-R-I-M-I-T-E-R-C-O@gmail.com or find me over on Facebook. You can hit me in the DMs.
00:21:19 Sheri: Thank you, friends, for spending this time with me. My hope is something you heard today inspires you to take action towards Discovering Your Calling. But before you sign off, just two more quick things. One, if you found value and enjoyed this episode, can you do me a huge favor and leave a review or share this with a friend? Help us grow the podcast to make a bigger impact on the world. And second of all, if you haven't yet, don't forget to check the show notes to grab your Five to Thrive guide. It's my gift to you. It's a guide to help you intentionally invest in your natural talents so you can turn them into strengths. Think of it as your personal navigational guide on your journey to a fulfilling life. And until next episode, remember, you've been created to live a life of fulfillment, purpose, success, and joy.